Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.
A serene, beautiful debut that brings together a busted-up rodeo rider and a teenaged ex-con who help each other heal at a family ranch in the Wild Canadian West.
Joe Willie Wolfchild has been a champion rodeo rider since childhood, but his ride on the infamous bull See Four leaves him so battered and maimed that he is forced to retire. He retreats to his Ojibway grandparents’ Wolf Creek ranch, where he is nursed by his Sioux mother, Johanna. Meanwhile, in a bleak suburb, 15-year-old Aiden Hartley drifts into a dangerous life of gangs, drugs and robbery, spurred by the trauma of seeing his black mother, Claire, beaten up by her white boyfriend. Aiden winds up in jail for two years, during which Claire extricates herself from the abusive boyfriend and starts a new life. When Aiden finishes doing his time, a sympathetic youth detective arranges a recuperative stay for him at Wolf Creek. Closed up within himself, Joe Willie is absorbed in trying to fix an old family truck given to him by his father, while Aiden is cocky and hostile. These two stubborn, wounded souls circle each other warily, drawn closer by Aiden’s startling natural propensity for riding. They come to an agreement: The boy will help Joe Willie fix his truck, and in return, the older man will teach him how to ride a bull—but not until Aiden becomes hardened by cowboy life, which includes punishing hikes up Iron Mountain and an encounter with a bear. And Johanna helps Claire restore her relationship with her son by sharing the healing ways of the Sioux. Wagamese, himself an Ojibway from northwestern Ontario, delineates with skill and dignity these stoical lives shaped by the land of their ancestors.
Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35926-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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